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 STORY OF THE DOOR

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance

that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and
embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean,
long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly
meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something
eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed
which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not
only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but
more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere
with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste
for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not
crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an
approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost
with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their
misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than
to reprove. “I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say
quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.” In
this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last
reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the
lives of downgoing men. And to such as these, so long as
they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of
change in his demeanour.
No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was
undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship
seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good-nature.
It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle
ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the
lawyer’s way. His friends were those of his own blood or
those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like
ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the
object. Hence, no doubt the bond that united him to
Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the well-known man
about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two
could see in each other, or what subject they could find in
common. It was reported by those who encountered them in
their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly
dull and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a
friend. For all that, the two men put the greatest store by
these excursions, counted them the chief jewel of each
week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even
resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them
uninterrupted.
It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led
them down a bystreet in a busy quarter of London. The
street was small and what is called quiet, but it drove a
thriving trade on the weekdays. The inhabitants were all
doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to do better
still, and laying out the surplus of their grains in coquetry;
so that the shop fronts stood along that thoroughfare with
an air of invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on
Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms and lay
comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in
contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest;
and with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished brasses,
and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught
and pleased the eye of the passenger.
Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east the
line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that
point a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its
gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no
window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind
forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every
feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The
door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was
blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and
struck matches on the panels; children kept shop upon the
steps; the schoolboy had tried his knife on the mouldings;
and for close on a generation, no one had appeared to drive
away these random visitors or to repair their ravages.
Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the
bystreet; but when they came abreast of the entry, the
former lifted up his cane and pointed.
“Did you ever remark that door?” he asked; and when his
companion had replied in the affirmative. “It is connected in
my mind,” added he, “with a very odd story.”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Utterson, with a slight change of voice,
“and what was that?”
“Well, it was this way,” returned Mr. Enfield: “I was coming
home from some place at the end of the world, about three
o’clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a
part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but
lamps. Street after street and all the folks asleep—street
after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as
empty as a church—till at last I got into that state of mind
when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the
sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a
little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk,
and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running
as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the
two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and
then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man
trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming
on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish
to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned
Juggernaut. I gave a few halloa, took to my heels, collared
my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was
already quite a group about the screaming child. He was
perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one
look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like
running. The people who had turned out were the girl’s own
family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been
sent put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the
worse, more frightened, according to the sawbones; and
there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But
there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing
to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child’s family,
which was only natural. But the doctor’s case was what
struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no
particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent
and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like
the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw
that sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him. I
knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in
mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next
best. We told the man we could and would make such a
scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one
end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any
credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the
time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the
women off him as best we could for they were as wild as
harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there
was the man in the middle, with a kind of black sneering
coolness—frightened too, I could see that—but carrying it
off, sir, really like Satan. ‘If you choose to make capital out of
this accident,’ said he, ‘I am naturally helpless. No
gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,’ says he. ‘Name your
figure.’ Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the
child’s family; he would have clearly liked to stick out; but
there was something about the lot of us that meant mischief,
and at last he struck. The next thing was to get the money;
and where do you think he carried us but to that place with
the door?—whipped out a key, went in, and presently came
back with the matter of ten pounds in gold and a cheque for
the balance on Coutts’s, drawn payable to bearer and signed
with a name that I can’t mention, though it’s one of the
points of my story, but it was a name at least very well
known and often printed. The figure was stiff; but the
signature was good for more than that if it was only genuine.
I took the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the
whole business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not,
in real life, walk into a cellar door at four in the morning and
come out with another man’s cheque for close upon a
hundred pounds. But he was quite easy and sneering. ‘Set
your mind at rest,’ says he, ‘I will stay with you till the banks
open and cash the cheque myself.’ So we all set off, the
doctor, and the child’s father, and our friend and myself, and
passed the rest of the night in my chambers; and next day,
when we had breakfasted, went in a body to the bank. I gave
in the cheque myself, and said I had every reason to believe
it was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was genuine.”
“Tut-tut,” said Mr. Utterson.
“I see you feel as I do,” said Mr. Enfield. “Yes, it’s a bad
story. For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do
with, a really damnable man; and the person that drew the
cheque is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too,
and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what
they call good. Black mail I suppose; an honest man paying
through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black
Mail House is what I call the place with the door, in
consequence. Though even that, you know, is far from
explaining all,” he added, and with the words fell into a vein
of musing.
From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking rather
suddenly: “And you don’t know if the drawer of the cheque
lives there?”
“A likely place, isn’t it?” returned Mr. Enfield. “But I happen
to have noticed his address; he lives in some square or
other.”
“And you never asked about the—place with the door?”
said Mr. Utterson.
 “No, sir: I had a delicacy,” was the reply. “I feel very
strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of
the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and
it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill;
and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently
some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is
knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family
have to change their name. No sir, I make it a rule of mine:
the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”
“A very good rule, too,” said the lawyer.
“But I have studied the place for myself,” continued
Mr. Enfield. “It seems scarcely a house. There is no other
door, and nobody goes in or out of that one but, once in a
great while, the gentleman of my adventure. There are three
windows looking on the court on the first floor; none below;
the windows are always shut but they’re clean. And then
there is a chimney which is generally smoking; so somebody
must live there. And yet it’s not so sure; for the buildings are
so packed together about the court, that it’s hard to say
where one ends and another begins.”
The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and then
“Enfield,” said Mr. Utterson, “that’s a good rule of yours.”
“Yes, I think it is,” returned Enfield.
“But for all that,” continued the lawyer, “there’s one point
I want to ask: I want to ask the name of that man who
walked over the child.”
“Well,” said Mr. Enfield, “I can’t see what harm it would do.
It was a man of the name of Hyde.”
“Hm,” said Mr. Utterson. “What sort of a man is he to see?”
“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with
his appearance; something displeasing, something
downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and
yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he
gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t
specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and
yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can
make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of
memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.”
Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and
obviously under a weight of consideration. “You are sure he
used a key?” he inquired at last.
“My dear sir …” began Enfield, surprised out of himself.
“Yes, I know,” said Utterson; “I know it must seem strange.
The fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it
is because I know it already. You see, Richard, your tale has
gone home. If you have been inexact in any point you had
better correct it.”
“I think you might have warned me,” returned the other
with a touch of sullenness. “But I have been pedantically
exact, as you call it. The fellow had a key; and what’s more,
he has it still. I saw him use it not a week ago.”
Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the
young man presently resumed. “Here is another lesson to
say nothing,” said he. “I am ashamed of my long tongue. Let
us make a bargain never to refer to this again.”
“With all my heart,” said the lawyer. “I shake hands on
that, Richard.”
 SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE

That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house

in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It
was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit
close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his
reading desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church
rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go soberly and
gratefully to bed. On this night however, as soon as the
cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his
business room. There he opened his safe, took from the most
private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as
“Dr. Jekyll’s Will” and sat down with a clouded brow to study
its contents. The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson though
he took charge of it now that it was made, had refused to
lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided not
only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.L.C.,
LL.D., F.R.S., etc., all his possessions were to pass into the
hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward Hyde,” but that
in case of Dr. Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained
absence for any period exceeding three calendar months,”
the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry
Jekyll’s shoes without further delay and free from any
burden or obligation beyond the payment of a few small
sums to the members of the doctor’s household. This
document had long been the lawyer’s eyesore. It offended
him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and
customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the
immodest. And hitherto it was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that
had swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was
his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name
was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was
worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable
attributes; and out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that
had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden,
definite presentment of a fiend.
“I thought it was madness,” he said, as he replaced the
obnoxious paper in the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is
disgrace.”
With that he blew out his candle, put on a greatcoat, and
set forth in the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of
medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his
house and received his crowding patients. “If anyone knows,
it will be Lanyon,” he had thought.
The solemn butler knew and welcomed him; he was
subjected to no stage of delay, but ushered direct from the
door to the dining room where Dr. Lanyon sat alone over his
wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced
gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a
boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he
sprang up from his chair and welcomed him with both
hands. The geniality, as was the way of the man, was
somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine
feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both at
school and college, both thorough respectors of themselves
and of each other, and what does not always follow, men
who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.
After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject
which so disagreeably preoccupied his mind.
“I suppose, Lanyon,” said he, “you and I must be the two
oldest friends that Henry Jekyll has?”
“I wish the friends were younger,” chuckled Dr. Lanyon.
“But I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him
now.”
 “Indeed?” said Utterson. “I thought you had a bond of
common interest.”
“We had,” was the reply. “But it is more than ten years
since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to
go wrong, wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to
take an interest in him for old sake’s sake, as they say, I see
and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific
balderdash,” added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple,
“would have estranged Damon and Pythias.”
This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to
Mr. Utterson. “They have only differed on some point of
science,” he thought; and being a man of no scientific
passions (except in the matter of conveyancing), he even
added: “It is nothing worse than that!” He gave his friend a
few seconds to recover his composure, and then approached
the question he had come to put. “Did you ever come across
a protégé of his—one Hyde?” he asked.
“Hyde?” repeated Lanyon. “No. Never heard of him. Since
my time.”
That was the amount of information that the lawyer
carried back with him to the great, dark bed on which he
tossed to and fro, until the small hours of the morning began
to grow large. It was a night of little ease to his toiling mind,
toiling in mere darkness and beseiged by questions.
Six o’clock struck on the bells of the church that was so
conveniently near to Mr. Utterson’s dwelling, and still he was
digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the
intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was
engaged, or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the
gross darkness of the night and the curtained room,
Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of
lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of
lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man
walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s;
and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the
child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else
he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay
asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the
door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed
plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would
stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and
even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. The
figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and
if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more
stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly
and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider
labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street corner
crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure
had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams,
it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his
eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace
in the lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an
inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real
Mr. Hyde. If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought
the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away,
as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined.
He might see a reason for his friend’s strange preference or
bondage (call it which you please) and even for the startling
clause of the will. At least it would be a face worth seeing:
the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy: a face
which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind of the
unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred.
From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the
door in the bystreet of shops. In the morning before office
hours, at noon when business was plenty, and time scarce,
at night under the face of the fogged city moon, by all lights
and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to
be found on his chosen post.
“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”
And at last his patience was rewarded. It was a fine dry
night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom
floor; the lamps, unshaken by any wind, drawing a regular
pattern of light and shadow. By ten o’clock, when the shops
were closed the bystreet was very solitary and, in spite of
the low growl of London from all round, very silent. Small
sounds carried far; domestic sounds out of the houses were
clearly audible on either side of the roadway; and the
rumour of the approach of any passenger preceded him by a
long time. Mr. Utterson had been some minutes at his post,
when he was aware of an odd light footstep drawing near. In
the course of his nightly patrols, he had long grown
accustomed to the quaint effect with which the footfalls of a
single person, while he is still a great way off, suddenly
spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city.
Yet his attention had never before been so sharply and
decisively arrested; and it was with a strong, superstitious
prevision of success that he withdrew into the entry of the
court.
The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly
louder as they turned the end of the street. The lawyer,
looking forth from the entry, could soon see what manner of
man he had to deal with. He was small and very plainly
dressed and the look of him, even at that distance, went
somehow strongly against the watcher’s inclination. But he
made straight for the door, crossing the roadway to save
time; and as he came, he drew a key from his pocket like one
approaching home.
Mr. Utterson stepped out and touched him on the shoulder
as he passed. “Mr. Hyde, I think?”
Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath.
But his fear was only momentary; and though he did not
look the lawyer in the face, he answered coolly enough:
“That is my name. What do you want?”
“I see you are going in,” returned the lawyer. “I am an old
friend of Dr. Jekyll’s—Mr. Utterson of Gaunt Street—you must
have heard of my name; and meeting you so conveniently, I
thought you might admit me.”
 “You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home,” replied
Mr. Hyde, blowing in the key. And then suddenly, but still
without looking up, “How did you know me?” he asked.
“On your side,” said Mr. Utterson “will you do me a
favour?”
“With pleasure,” replied the other. “What shall it be?”
“Will you let me see your face?” asked the lawyer.
Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon some
sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and
the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds.
“Now I shall know you again,” said Mr. Utterson. “It may be
useful.”
“Yes,” returned Mr. Hyde, “It is as well we have met; and
apropos, you should have my address.” And he gave a
number of a street in Soho.
“Good God!” thought Mr. Utterson, “can he, too, have been
thinking of the will?” But he kept his feelings to himself and
only grunted in acknowledgment of the address.
“And now,” said the other, “how did you know me?”
“By description,” was the reply.
“Whose description?”
“We have common friends,” said Mr. Utterson.
“Common friends,” echoed Mr. Hyde, a little hoarsely.
“Who are they?”
“Jekyll, for instance,” said the lawyer.
“He never told you,” cried Mr. Hyde, with a flush of anger.
“I did not think you would have lied.”
“Come,” said Mr. Utterson, “that is not fitting language.”
The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next
moment, with extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the
door and disappeared into the house.
The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the
picture of disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the
street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his
brow like a man in mental perplexity. The problem he was
thus debating as he walked, was one of a class that is rarely
solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an
impression of deformity without any nameable
malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne
himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of
timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky,
whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were
points against him, but not all of these together could
explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with
which Mr. Utterson regarded him. “There must be something
else,” said the perplexed gentleman. “There is something
more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man
seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?
or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere
radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and
transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my
poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a
face, it is on that of your new friend.”
Round the corner from the bystreet, there was a square of
ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed
from their high estate and let in flats and chambers to all
sorts and conditions of men; map-engravers, architects,
shady lawyers and the agents of obscure enterprises. One
house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied
entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of
wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness
except for the fanlight, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. A
well-dressed, elderly servant opened the door.
“Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole?” asked the lawyer.
“I will see, Mr. Utterson,” said Poole, admitting the visitor,
as he spoke, into a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall paved
with flags, warmed (after the fashion of a country house) by
a bright, open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak.
“Will you wait here by the fire, sir? or shall I give you a light
in the dining room?”
“Here, thank you,” said the lawyer, and he drew near and
leaned on the tall fender. This hall, in which he was now left
alone, was a pet fancy of his friend the doctor’s; and
Utterson himself was wont to speak of it as the pleasantest
room in London. But tonight there was a shudder in his
blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy on his memory; he felt
(what was rare with him) a nausea and distaste of life; and in
the gloom of his spirits, he seemed to read a menace in the
flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the
uneasy starting of the shadow on the roof. He was ashamed
of his relief, when Poole presently returned to announce that
Dr. Jekyll was gone out.
“I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting room, Poole,”
he said. “Is that right, when Dr. Jekyll is from home?”
“Quite right, Mr. Utterson, sir,” replied the servant.
“Mr. Hyde has a key.”
“Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that
young man, Poole,” resumed the other musingly.
“Yes, sir, he does indeed,” said Poole. “We have all orders
to obey him.”
“I do not think I ever met Mr. Hyde?” asked Utterson.
“O, dear no, sir. He never dines here,” replied the butler.
“Indeed we see very little of him on this side of the house;
he mostly comes and goes by the laboratory.”
“Well, goodnight, Poole.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Utterson.”
And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart.
“Poor Harry Jekyll,” he thought, “my mind misgives me he is
in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long
while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no
statute of limitations. Aye, it must be that; the ghost of some
old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment
coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and
self-love condoned the fault.” And the lawyer, scared by the
thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the
corners of memory, least by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of
an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly
blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less
apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many
ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and
fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing
yet avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he
conceived a spark of hope. “This Master Hyde, if he were
studied,” thought he, “must have secrets of his own; black
secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared to which poor
Jekyll’s worst would be like sunshine. Things cannot
continue as they are. It turns me cold to think of this
creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside; poor Harry,
what a wakening! And the danger of it; for if this Hyde
suspects the existence of the will, he may grow impatient to
inherit. Aye, I must put my shoulders to the wheel—if Jekyll
will but let me,” he added, “if Jekyll will only let me.” For
once more he saw before his mind’s eye, as clear as
transparency, the strange clauses of the will.
 DR. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE

A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave

one of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all
intelligent, reputable men and all judges of good wine; and
Mr. Utterson so contrived that he remained behind after the
others had departed. This was no new arrangement, but a
thing that had befallen many scores of times. Where
Utterson was liked, he was liked well. Hosts loved to detain
the dry lawyer, when the lighthearted and loose-tongued
had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit a
while in his unobtrusive company, practising for solitude,
sobering their minds in the man’s rich silence after the
expense and strain of gaiety. To this rule, Dr. Jekyll was no
exception; and as he now sat on the opposite side of the
fire—a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with
something of a stylish cast perhaps, but every mark of
capacity and kindness—you could see by his looks that he
cherished for Mr. Utterson a sincere and warm affection.
“I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll,” began the
latter. “You know that will of yours?”
A close observer might have gathered that the topic was
distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily. “My poor
Utterson,” said he, “you are unfortunate in such a client. I
never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will;
unless it were that hidebound pedant, Lanyon, at what he
called my scientific heresies. O, I know he’s a good fellow—
you needn’t frown—an excellent fellow, and I always mean
to see more of him; but a hidebound pedant for all that; an
ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in
any man than Lanyon.”
“You know I never approved of it,” pursued Utterson,
ruthlessly disregarding the fresh topic.
“My will? Yes, certainly, I know that,” said the doctor, a
trifle sharply. “You have told me so.”
“Well, I tell you so again,” continued the lawyer. “I have
been learning something of young Hyde.”
The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to the very
lips, and there came a blackness about his eyes. “I do not
care to hear more,” said he. “This is a matter I thought we
had agreed to drop.”
“What I heard was abominable,” said Utterson.
“It can make no change. You do not understand my
position,” returned the doctor, with a certain incoherency of
manner. “I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a
very strange—a very strange one. It is one of those affairs
that cannot be mended by talking.”
“Jekyll,” said Utterson, “you know me: I am a man to be
trusted. Make a clean breast of this in confidence; and I
make no doubt I can get you out of it.”
“My good Utterson,” said the doctor, “this is very good of
you, this is downright good of you, and I cannot find words
to thank you in. I believe you fully; I would trust you before
any man alive, aye, before myself, if I could make the
choice; but indeed it isn’t what you fancy; it is not as bad as
that; and just to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you
one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde. I
give you my hand upon that; and I thank you again and
again; and I will just add one little word, Utterson, that I’m
sure you’ll take in good part: this is a private matter, and I
beg of you to let it sleep.”
Utterson reflected a little, looking in the fire.
“I have no doubt you are perfectly right,” he said at last,
getting to his feet.
 “Well, but since we have touched upon this business, and
for the last time I hope,” continued the doctor, “there is one
point I should like you to understand. I have really a very
great interest in poor Hyde. I know you have seen him; he
told me so; and I fear he was rude. But I do sincerely take a
great, a very great interest in that young man; and if I am
taken away, Utterson, I wish you to promise me that you will
bear with him and get his rights for him. I think you would, if
you knew all; and it would be a weight off my mind if you
would promise.”
“I can’t pretend that I shall ever like him,” said the lawyer.
“I don’t ask that,” pleaded Jekyll, laying his hand upon the
other’s arm; “I only ask for justice; I only ask you to help him
for my sake, when I am no longer here.”
Utterson heaved an irrepressible sigh. “Well,” said he, “I
promise.”
 THE CAREW MURDER CASE

Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18—, London

was startled by a crime of singular ferocity and rendered all
the more notable by the high position of the victim. The
details were few and startling. A maid servant living alone in
a house not far from the river, had gone upstairs to bed
about eleven. Although a fog rolled over the city in the small
hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the
lane, which the maid’s window overlooked, was brilliantly lit
by the full moon. It seems she was romantically given, for
she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under
the window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she
used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated that
experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men
or thought more kindly of the world. And as she so sat she
became aware of an aged beautiful gentleman with white
hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet
him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she
paid less attention. When they had come within speech
(which was just under the maid’s eyes) the older man bowed
and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of
politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address
were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it some
times appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the
moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was
pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent
and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something
high too, as of a well-founded self-content. Presently her eye
wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in
him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and
for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a
heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered
never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained
impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great
flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the
cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a
madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of
one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that
Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the
earth. And next moment, with apelike fury, he was trampling
his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows,
under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body
jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and
sounds, the maid fainted.
It was two o’clock when she came to herself and called for
the police. The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay
his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The
stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of
some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in
the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and
one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter—
the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the
murderer. A purse and gold watch were found upon the
victim: but no cards or papers, except a sealed and stamped
envelope, which he had been probably carrying to the post,
and which bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson.
This was brought to the lawyer the next morning, before
he was out of bed; and he had no sooner seen it and been
told the circumstances, than he shot out a solemn lip. “I
shall say nothing till I have seen the body,” said he; “this
may be very serious. Have the kindness to wait while I
dress.” And with the same grave countenance he hurried
through his breakfast and drove to the police station,
whither the body had been carried. As soon as he came into
the cell, he nodded.
“Yes,” said he, “I recognise him. I am sorry to say that this
is Sir Danvers Carew.”
“Good God, sir,” exclaimed the officer, “is it possible?” And
the next moment his eye lighted up with professional
ambition. “This will make a deal of noise,” he said. “And
perhaps you can help us to the man.” And he briefly
narrated what the maid had seen, and showed the broken
stick.
Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but
when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no
longer; broken and battered as it was, he recognized it for
one that he had himself presented many years before to
Henry Jekyll.
“Is this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature?” he inquired.
“Particularly small and particularly wicked-looking, is what
the maid calls him,” said the officer.
Mr. Utterson reflected; and then, raising his head, “If you
will come with me in my cab,” he said, “I think I can take you
to his house.”
It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first
fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered
over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and
routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled
from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous
number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be
dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a
glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange
conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be
quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would
glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter
of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy
ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had
never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to
combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the
lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. The
thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye;
and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was
conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the
law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.
As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog
lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a
low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny
numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children
huddled in the doorways, and many women of many
different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a
morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down
again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off
from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of
Henry Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter
of a million sterling.
An ivory-faced and silvery-haired old woman opened the
door. She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy: but her
manners were excellent. Yes, she said, this was Mr. Hyde’s,
but he was not at home; he had been in that night very late,
but he had gone away again in less than an hour; there was
nothing strange in that; his habits were very irregular, and
he was often absent; for instance, it was nearly two months
since she had seen him till yesterday.
“Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms,” said the
lawyer; and when the woman began to declare it was
impossible, “I had better tell you who this person is,” he
added. “This is Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard.”
A flash of odious joy appeared upon the woman’s face.
“Ah!” said she, “he is in trouble! What has he done?”
Mr. Utterson and the inspector exchanged glances. “He
don’t seem a very popular character,” observed the latter.
“And now, my good woman, just let me and this gentleman
have a look about us.”
In the whole extent of the house, which but for the old
woman remained otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a
couple of rooms; but these were furnished with luxury and
good taste. A closet was filled with wine; the plate was of
silver, the napery elegant; a good picture hung upon the
walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who
was much of a connoisseur; and the carpets were of many
plies and agreeable in colour. At this moment, however, the
rooms bore every mark of having been recently and
hurriedly ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their
pockets inside out; lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the
hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers
had been burned. From these embers the inspector
disinterred the butt end of a green cheque book, which had
resisted the action of the fire; the other half of the stick was
found behind the door; and as this clinched his suspicions,
the officer declared himself delighted. A visit to the bank,
where several thousand pounds were found to be lying to
the murderer’s credit, completed his gratification.
“You may depend upon it, sir,” he told Mr. Utterson: “I
have him in my hand. He must have lost his head, or he
never would have left the stick or, above all, burned the
cheque book. Why, money’s life to the man. We have
nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the
handbills.”
This last, however, was not so easy of accomplishment; for
Mr. Hyde had numbered few familiars—even the master of
the servant maid had only seen him twice; his family could
nowhere be traced; he had never been photographed; and
the few who could describe him differed widely, as common
observers will. Only on one point were they agreed; and that
was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with
which the fugitive impressed his beholders.
 INCIDENT OF THE LETTER

It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found his way
to Dr. Jekyll’s door, where he was at once admitted by Poole,
and carried down by the kitchen offices and across a yard
which had once been a garden, to the building which was
indifferently known as the laboratory or dissecting rooms.
The doctor had bought the house from the heirs of a
celebrated surgeon; and his own tastes being rather
chemical than anatomical, had changed the destination of
the block at the bottom of the garden. It was the first time
that the lawyer had been received in that part of his friend’s
quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with
curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of
strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with
eager students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables
laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates
and littered with packing straw, and the light falling dimly
through the foggy cupola. At the further end, a flight of
stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize; and
through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received into the
doctor’s cabinet. It was a large room fitted round with glass
presses, furnished, among other things, with a cheval-glass
and a business table, and looking out upon the court by
three dusty windows barred with iron. The fire burned in the
grate; a lamp was set lighted on the chimney shelf, for even
in the houses the fog began to lie thickly; and there, close
up to the warmth, sat Dr. Jekyll, looking deathly sick. He did
not rise to meet his visitor, but held out a cold hand and
bade him welcome in a changed voice.
“And now,” said Mr. Utterson, as soon as Poole had left
them, “you have heard the news?”
The doctor shuddered. “They were crying it in the square,”
he said. “I heard them in my dining room.”
“One word,” said the lawyer. “Carew was my client, but so
are you, and I want to know what I am doing. You have not
been mad enough to hide this fellow?”
“Utterson, I swear to God,” cried the doctor, “I swear to
God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to
you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end.
And indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him
as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will
never more be heard of.”
The lawyer listened gloomily; he did not like his friend’s
feverish manner. “You seem pretty sure of him,” said he;
“and for your sake, I hope you may be right. If it came to a
trial, your name might appear.”
“I am quite sure of him,” replied Jekyll; “I have grounds for
certainty that I cannot share with anyone. But there is one
thing on which you may advise me. I have—I have received
a letter; and I am at a loss whether I should show it to the
police. I should like to leave it in your hands, Utterson; you
would judge wisely, I am sure; I have so great a trust in you.”
“You fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detection?”
asked the lawyer.
“No,” said the other. “I cannot say that I care what
becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking
of my own character, which this hateful business has rather
exposed.”
Utterson ruminated awhile; he was surprised at his friend’s
selfishness, and yet relieved by it. “Well,” said he, at last,
“let me see the letter.”
The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and signed
“Edward Hyde”: and it signified, briefly enough, that the
writer’s benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, whom he had long so
unworthily repaid for a thousand generosities, need labour
under no alarm for his safety, as he had means of escape on
which he placed a sure dependence. The lawyer liked this
letter well enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy
than he had looked for; and he blamed himself for some of
his past suspicions.
“Have you the envelope?” he asked.
“I burned it,” replied Jekyll, “before I thought what I was
about. But it bore no postmark. The note was handed in.”
“Shall I keep this and sleep upon it?” asked Utterson.
“I wish you to judge for me entirely,” was the reply. “I have
lost confidence in myself.”
“Well, I shall consider,” returned the lawyer. “And now one
word more: it was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will
about that disappearance?”
The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness; he
shut his mouth tight and nodded.
“I knew it,” said Utterson. “He meant to murder you. You
had a fine escape.”
“I have had what is far more to the purpose,” returned the
doctor solemnly: “I have had a lesson—O God, Utterson,
what a lesson I have had!” And he covered his face for a
moment with his hands.
On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word or two
with Poole. “By the bye,” said he, “there was a letter handed
in today: what was the messenger like?” But Poole was
positive nothing had come except by post; “and only
circulars by that,” he added.
This news sent off the visitor with his fears renewed.
Plainly the letter had come by the laboratory door; possibly,
indeed, it had been written in the cabinet; and if that were
so, it must be differently judged, and handled with the more
caution. The newsboys, as he went, were crying themselves
hoarse along the footways: “Special edition. Shocking
murder of an M.P.” That was the funeral oration of one friend
and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest
the good name of another should be sucked down in the
eddy of the scandal. It was, at least, a ticklish decision that
he had to make; and self-reliant as he was by habit, he
began to cherish a longing for advice. It was not to be had
directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might be fished for.
Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with
Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway
between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a
bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned
in the foundations of his house. The fog still slept on the
wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered
like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of
these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still
rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a
mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight. In the
bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye
had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained
windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside
vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs
of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. There was no man
from whom he kept fewer secrets than Mr. Guest; and he was
not always sure that he kept as many as he meant. Guest
had often been on business to the doctor’s; he knew Poole;
he could scarce have failed to hear of Mr. Hyde’s familiarity
about the house; he might draw conclusions: was it not as
well, then, that he should see a letter which put that
mystery to right? and above all since Guest, being a great
student and critic of handwriting, would consider the step
natural and obliging? The clerk, besides, was a man of
counsel; he could scarce read so strange a document
without dropping a remark; and by that remark Mr. Utterson
might shape his future course.
“This is a sad business about Sir Danvers,” he said.
“Yes, sir, indeed. It has elicited a great deal of public
feeling,” returned Guest. “The man, of course, was mad.”
 “I should like to hear your views on that,” replied Utterson.
“I have a document here in his handwriting; it is between
ourselves, for I scarce know what to do about it; it is an ugly
business at the best. But there it is; quite in your way: a
murderer’s autograph.”
Guest’s eyes brightened, and he sat down at once and
studied it with passion. “No sir,” he said: “not mad; but it is
an odd hand.”
“And by all accounts a very odd writer,” added the lawyer.
Just then the servant entered with a note.
“Is that from Dr. Jekyll, sir?” inquired the clerk. “I thought I
knew the writing. Anything private, Mr. Utterson?”
“Only an invitation to dinner. Why? Do you want to see it?”
“One moment. I thank you, sir;” and the clerk laid the two
sheets of paper alongside and sedulously compared their
contents. “Thank you, sir,” he said at last, returning both;
“it’s a very interesting autograph.”
There was a pause, during which Mr. Utterson struggled
with himself. “Why did you compare them, Guest?” he
inquired suddenly.
“Well, sir,” returned the clerk, “there’s a rather singular
resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical:
only differently sloped.”
“Rather quaint,” said Utterson.
“It is, as you say, rather quaint,” returned Guest.
“I wouldn’t speak of this note, you know,” said the master.
“No, sir,” said the clerk. “I understand.”
But no sooner was Mr. Utterson alone that night, than he
locked the note into his safe, where it reposed from that time
forward. “What!” he thought. “Henry Jekyll forge for a
murderer!” And his blood ran cold in his veins.
 INCIDENT OF DR. LANYON

Time ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in reward, for

the death of Sir Danvers was resented as a public injury; but
Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as
though he had never existed. Much of his past was
unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came out of
the man’s cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile
life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to
have surrounded his career; but of his present whereabouts,
not a whisper. From the time he had left the house in Soho
on the morning of the murder, he was simply blotted out;
and gradually, as time drew on, Mr. Utterson began to
recover from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow more at
quiet with himself. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way
of thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of
Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn,
a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He came out of his seclusion,
renewed relations with his friends, became once more their
familiar guest and entertainer; and whilst he had always
been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished
for religion. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he
did good; his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with
an inward consciousness of service; and for more than two
months, the doctor was at peace.
On the 8th of January Utterson had dined at the doctor’s
with a small party; Lanyon had been there; and the face of
the host had looked from one to the other as in the old days
when the trio were inseparable friends. On the 12th, and
again on the 14th, the door was shut against the lawyer.
“The doctor was confined to the house,” Poole said, “and
saw no one.” On the 15th, he tried again, and was again
refused; and having now been used for the last two months
to see his friend almost daily, he found this return of solitude
to weigh upon his spirits. The fifth night he had in Guest to
dine with him; and the sixth he betook himself to
Dr. Lanyon’s.
There at least he was not denied admittance; but when he
came in, he was shocked at the change which had taken
place in the doctor’s appearance. He had his death-warrant
written legibly upon his face. The rosy man had grown pale;
his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder and older;
and yet it was not so much these tokens of a swift physical
decay that arrested the lawyer’s notice, as a look in the eye
and quality of manner that seemed to testify to some deep-
seated terror of the mind. It was unlikely that the doctor
should fear death; and yet that was what Utterson was
tempted to suspect. “Yes,” he thought; “he is a doctor, he
must know his own state and that his days are counted; and
the knowledge is more than he can bear.” And yet when
Utterson remarked on his ill-looks, it was with an air of great
firmness that Lanyon declared himself a doomed man.
“I have had a shock,” he said, “and I shall never recover. It
is a question of weeks. Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it;
yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew all, we
should be more glad to get away.”
“Jekyll is ill, too,” observed Utterson. “Have you seen
him?”
But Lanyon’s face changed, and he held up a trembling
hand. “I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll,” he said in
a loud, unsteady voice. “I am quite done with that person;
and I beg that you will spare me any allusion to one whom I
regard as dead.”
“Tut-tut,” said Mr. Utterson; and then after a considerable
pause, “Can’t I do anything?” he inquired. “We are three
very old friends, Lanyon; we shall not live to make others.”
“Nothing can be done,” returned Lanyon; “ask himself.”
“He will not see me,” said the lawyer.
“I am not surprised at that,” was the reply. “Some day,
Utterson, after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn
the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you. And in the
meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of other things, for
God’s sake, stay and do so; but if you cannot keep clear of
this accursed topic, then in God’s name, go, for I cannot
bear it.”
As soon as he got home, Utterson sat down and wrote to
Jekyll, complaining of his exclusion from the house, and
asking the cause of this unhappy break with Lanyon; and
the next day brought him a long answer, often very
pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly mysterious in
drift. The quarrel with Lanyon was incurable. “I do not blame
our old friend,” Jekyll wrote, “but I share his view that we
must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of
extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you
doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you.
You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought
on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If
I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I
could not think that this earth contained a place for
sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but
one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that is to
respect my silence.” Utterson was amazed; the dark
influence of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor had
returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago, the
prospect had smiled with every promise of a cheerful and an
honoured age; and now in a moment, friendship, and peace
of mind, and the whole tenor of his life were wrecked. So
great and unprepared a change pointed to madness; but in
view of Lanyon’s manner and words, there must lie for it
some deeper ground.
 A week afterwards Dr. Lanyon took to his bed, and in
something less than a fortnight he was dead. The night after
the funeral, at which he had been sadly affected, Utterson
locked the door of his business room, and sitting there by
the light of a melancholy candle, drew out and set before
him an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the
seal of his dead friend. “PRIVATE: for the hands of G. J.
Utterson ALONE, and in case of his predecease to be destroyed
unread,” so it was emphatically superscribed; and the
lawyer dreaded to behold the contents. “I have buried one
friend today,” he thought: “what if this should cost me
another?” And then he condemned the fear as a disloyalty,
and broke the seal. Within there was another enclosure,
likewise sealed, and marked upon the cover as “not to be
opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll.”
Utterson could not trust his eyes. Yes, it was disappearance;
here again, as in the mad will which he had long ago
restored to its author, here again were the idea of a
disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll bracketted. But
in the will, that idea had sprung from the sinister suggestion
of the man Hyde; it was set there with a purpose all too plain
and horrible. Written by the hand of Lanyon, what should it
mean? A great curiosity came on the trustee, to disregard
the prohibition and dive at once to the bottom of these
mysteries; but professional honour and faith to his dead
friend were stringent obligations; and the packet slept in the
inmost corner of his private safe.
It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it;
and it may be doubted if, from that day forth, Utterson
desired the society of his surviving friend with the same
eagerness. He thought of him kindly; but his thoughts were
disquieted and fearful. He went to call indeed; but he was
perhaps relieved to be denied admittance; perhaps, in his
heart, he preferred to speak with Poole upon the doorstep
and surrounded by the air and sounds of the open city,
rather than to be admitted into that house of voluntary
bondage, and to sit and speak with its inscrutable recluse.
Poole had, indeed, no very pleasant news to communicate.
The doctor, it appeared, now more than ever confined
himself to the cabinet over the laboratory, where he would
sometimes even sleep; he was out of spirits, he had grown
very silent, he did not read; it seemed as if he had
something on his mind. Utterson became so used to the
unvarying character of these reports, that he fell off little by
little in the frequency of his visits.
 INCIDENT AT THE WINDOW

It chanced on Sunday, when Mr. Utterson was on his usual

walk with Mr. Enfield, that their way lay once again through
the bystreet; and that when they came in front of the door,
both stopped to gaze on it.
“Well,” said Enfield, “that story’s at an end at least. We
shall never see more of Mr. Hyde.”
“I hope not,” said Utterson. “Did I ever tell you that I once
saw him, and shared your feeling of repulsion?”
“It was impossible to do the one without the other,”
returned Enfield. “And by the way, what an ass you must
have thought me, not to know that this was a back way to
Dr. Jekyll’s! It was partly your own fault that I found it out,
even when I did.”
“So you found it out, did you?” said Utterson. “But if that
be so, we may step into the court and take a look at the
windows. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy about poor Jekyll;
and even outside, I feel as if the presence of a friend might
do him good.”
The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of
premature twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was
still bright with sunset. The middle one of the three windows
was halfway open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air
with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate
prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll.
“What! Jekyll!” he cried. “I trust you are better.”
“I am very low, Utterson,” replied the doctor drearily, “very
low. It will not last long, thank God.”
 “You stay too much indoors,” said the lawyer. “You should
be out, whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me.
(This is my cousin—Mr. Enfield—Dr. Jekyll.) Come now; get
your hat and take a quick turn with us.”
“You are very good,” sighed the other. “I should like to
very much; but no, no, no, it is quite impossible; I dare not.
But indeed, Utterson, I am very glad to see you; this is really
a great pleasure; I would ask you and Mr. Enfield up, but the
place is really not fit.”
“Why, then,” said the lawyer, good-naturedly, “the best
thing we can do is to stay down here and speak with you
from where we are.”
“That is just what I was about to venture to propose,”
returned the doctor with a smile. But the words were hardly
uttered, before the smile was struck out of his face and
succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and
despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below.
They saw it but for a glimpse for the window was instantly
thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they
turned and left the court without a word. In silence, too, they
traversed the bystreet; and it was not until they had come
into a neighbouring thoroughfare, where even upon a
Sunday there were still some stirrings of life, that
Mr. Utterson at last turned and looked at his companion.
They were both pale; and there was an answering horror in
their eyes.
“God forgive us, God forgive us,” said Mr. Utterson.
But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, and
walked on once more in silence.
 THE LAST NIGHT

Mr. Utterson was sitting by his fireside one evening after

dinner, when he was surprised to receive a visit from Poole.
“Bless me, Poole, what brings you here?” he cried; and
then taking a second look at him, “What ails you?” he
added; “is the doctor ill?”
“Mr. Utterson,” said the man, “there is something wrong.”
“Take a seat, and here is a glass of wine for you,” said the
lawyer. “Now, take your time, and tell me plainly what you
want.”
“You know the doctor’s ways, sir,” replied Poole, “and how
he shuts himself up. Well, he’s shut up again in the cabinet;
and I don’t like it, sir—I wish I may die if I like it.
Mr. Utterson, sir, I’m afraid.”
“Now, my good man,” said the lawyer, “be explicit. What
are you afraid of?”
“I’ve been afraid for about a week,” returned Poole,
doggedly disregarding the question, “and I can bear it no
more.”
The man’s appearance amply bore out his words; his
manner was altered for the worse; and except for the
moment when he had first announced his terror, he had not
once looked the lawyer in the face. Even now, he sat with
the glass of wine untasted on his knee, and his eyes directed
to a corner of the floor. “I can bear it no more,” he repeated.
“Come,” said the lawyer, “I see you have some good
reason, Poole; I see there is something seriously amiss. Try to
tell me what it is.”
 “I think there’s been foul play,” said Poole, hoarsely.
“Foul play!” cried the lawyer, a good deal frightened and
rather inclined to be irritated in consequence. “What foul
play! What does the man mean?”
“I daren’t say, sir,” was the answer; “but will you come
along with me and see for yourself?”
Mr. Utterson’s only answer was to rise and get his hat and
greatcoat; but he observed with wonder the greatness of the
relief that appeared upon the butler’s face, and perhaps with
no less, that the wine was still untasted when he set it down
to follow.
It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale
moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her,
and flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture.
The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into
the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare
of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had
never seen that part of London so deserted. He could have
wished it otherwise; never in his life had he been conscious
of so sharp a wish to see and touch his fellow-creatures; for
struggle as he might, there was borne in upon his mind a
crushing anticipation of calamity. The square, when they got
there, was full of wind and dust, and the thin trees in the
garden were lashing themselves along the railing. Poole,
who had kept all the way a pace or two ahead, now pulled
up in the middle of the pavement, and in spite of the biting
weather, took off his hat and mopped his brow with a red
pocket-handkerchief. But for all the hurry of his coming,
these were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away, but
the moisture of some strangling anguish; for his face was
white and his voice, when he spoke, harsh and broken.
“Well, sir,” he said, “here we are, and God grant there be
nothing wrong.”
“Amen, Poole,” said the lawyer.
Thereupon the servant knocked in a very guarded manner;
the door was opened on the chain; and a voice asked from
within, “Is that you, Poole?”
“It’s all right,” said Poole. “Open the door.”
The hall, when they entered it, was brightly lighted up; the
fire was built high; and about the hearth the whole of the
servants, men and women, stood huddled together like a
flock of sheep. At the sight of Mr. Utterson, the housemaid
broke into hysterical whimpering; and the cook, crying out
“Bless God! it’s Mr. Utterson,” ran forward as if to take him in
her arms.
“What, what? Are you all here?” said the lawyer peevishly.
“Very irregular, very unseemly; your master would be far
from pleased.”
“They’re all afraid,” said Poole.
Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the maid
lifted her voice and now wept loudly.
“Hold your tongue!” Poole said to her, with a ferocity of
accent that testified to his own jangled nerves; and indeed,
when the girl had so suddenly raised the note of her
lamentation, they had all started and turned towards the
inner door with faces of dreadful expectation. “And now,”
continued the butler, addressing the knife-boy, “reach me a
candle, and we’ll get this through hands at once.” And then
he begged Mr. Utterson to follow him, and led the way to the
back garden.
“Now, sir,” said he, “you come as gently as you can. I want
you to hear, and I don’t want you to be heard. And see here,
sir, if by any chance he was to ask you in, don’t go.”
Mr. Utterson’s nerves, at this unlooked-for termination,
gave a jerk that nearly threw him from his balance; but he
recollected his courage and followed the butler into the
laboratory building through the surgical theatre, with its
lumber of crates and bottles, to the foot of the stair. Here
Poole motioned him to stand on one side and listen; while he
himself, setting down the candle and making a great and
obvious call on his resolution, mounted the steps and
knocked with a somewhat uncertain hand on the red baize
of the cabinet door.
“Mr. Utterson, sir, asking to see you,” he called; and even
as he did so, once more violently signed to the lawyer to
give ear.
A voice answered from within: “Tell him I cannot see
anyone,” it said complainingly.
“Thank you, sir,” said Poole, with a note of something like
triumph in his voice; and taking up his candle, he led
Mr. Utterson back across the yard and into the great kitchen,
where the fire was out and the beetles were leaping on the
floor.
“Sir,” he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, “Was that
my master’s voice?”
“It seems much changed,” replied the lawyer, very pale,
but giving look for look.
“Changed? Well, yes, I think so,” said the butler. “Have I
been twenty years in this man’s house, to be deceived about
his voice? No, sir; master’s made away with; he was made
away with eight days ago, when we heard him cry out upon
the name of God; and who’s in there instead of him, and why
it stays there, is a thing that cries to Heaven, Mr. Utterson!”
“This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale
my man,” said Mr. Utterson, biting his finger. “Suppose it
were as you suppose, supposing Dr. Jekyll to have been—
well, murdered what could induce the murderer to stay?
That won’t hold water; it doesn’t commend itself to reason.”
“Well, Mr. Utterson, you are a hard man to satisfy, but I’ll
do it yet,” said Poole. “All this last week (you must know)
him, or it, whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been
crying night and day for some sort of medicine and cannot
get it to his mind. It was sometimes his way—the master’s,
that is—to write his orders on a sheet of paper and throw it
on the stair. We’ve had nothing else this week back; nothing
but papers, and a closed door, and the very meals left there
to be smuggled in when nobody was looking. Well, sir, every
day, aye, and twice and thrice in the same day, there have
been orders and complaints, and I have been sent flying to
all the wholesale chemists in town. Every time I brought the
stuff back, there would be another paper telling me to return
it, because it was not pure, and another order to a different
firm. This drug is wanted bitter bad, sir, whatever for.”
“Have you any of these papers?” asked Mr. Utterson.
Poole felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled note,
which the lawyer, bending nearer to the candle, carefully
examined. Its contents ran thus: “Dr. Jekyll presents his
compliments to Messrs. Maw. He assures them that their last
sample is impure and quite useless for his present purpose.
In the year 18—, Dr. J. purchased a somewhat large quantity
from Messrs. M. He now begs them to search with most
sedulous care, and should any of the same quality be left,
forward it to him at once. Expense is no consideration. The
importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated.” So
far the letter had run composedly enough, but here with a
sudden splutter of the pen, the writer’s emotion had broken
loose. “For God’s sake,” he added, “find me some of the old.”
“This is a strange note,” said Mr. Utterson; and then
sharply, “How do you come to have it open?”
“The man at Maw’s was main angry, sir, and he threw it
back to me like so much dirt,” returned Poole.
“This is unquestionably the doctor’s hand, do you know?”
resumed the lawyer.
“I thought it looked like it,” said the servant rather sulkily;
and then, with another voice, “But what matters hand of
write?” he said. “I’ve seen him!”
“Seen him?” repeated Mr. Utterson. “Well?”
“That’s it!” said Poole. “It was this way. I came suddenly
into the theatre from the garden. It seems he had slipped
out to look for this drug or whatever it is; for the cabinet
door was open, and there he was at the far end of the room
digging among the crates. He looked up when I came in,
gave a kind of cry, and whipped upstairs into the cabinet. It
was but for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood
upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had
he a mask upon his face? If it was my master, why did he cry
out like a rat, and run from me? I have served him long
enough. And then …” The man paused and passed his hand
over his face.
“These are all very strange circumstances,” said
Mr. Utterson, “but I think I begin to see daylight. Your
master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those maladies
that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence, for aught I
know, the alteration of his voice; hence the mask and the
avoidance of his friends; hence his eagerness to find this
drug, by means of which the poor soul retains some hope of
ultimate recovery—God grant that he be not deceived!
There is my explanation; it is sad enough, Poole, aye, and
appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs well
together, and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms.”
“Sir,” said the butler, turning to a sort of mottled pallor,
“that thing was not my master, and there’s the truth. My
master”—here he looked round him and began to
whisper—“is a tall, fine build of a man, and this was more of
a dwarf.” Utterson attempted to protest. “O, sir,” cried Poole,
“do you think I do not know my master after twenty years?
Do you think I do not know where his head comes to in the
cabinet door, where I saw him every morning of my life? No,
sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll—God knows
what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll; and it is the belief of
my heart that there was murder done.”
“Poole,” replied the lawyer, “if you say that, it will become
my duty to make certain. Much as I desire to spare your
master’s feelings, much as I am puzzled by this note which
seems to prove him to be still alive, I shall consider it my
duty to break in that door.”
“Ah, Mr. Utterson, that’s talking!” cried the butler.
“And now comes the second question,” resumed Utterson:
“Who is going to do it?”
 “Why, you and me, sir,” was the undaunted reply.
“That’s very well said,” returned the lawyer; “and
whatever comes of it, I shall make it my business to see you
are no loser.”
“There is an axe in the theatre,” continued Poole; “and you
might take the kitchen poker for yourself.”
The lawyer took that rude but weighty instrument into his
hand, and balanced it. “Do you know, Poole,” he said,
looking up, “that you and I are about to place ourselves in a
position of some peril?”
“You may say so, sir, indeed,” returned the butler.
“It is well, then that we should be frank,” said the other.
“We both think more than we have said; let us make a clean
breast. This masked figure that you saw, did you recognise
it?”
“Well, sir, it went so quick, and the creature was so
doubled up, that I could hardly swear to that,” was the
answer. “But if you mean, was it Mr. Hyde?—why, yes, I think
it was! You see, it was much of the same bigness; and it had
the same quick, light way with it; and then who else could
have got in by the laboratory door? You have not forgot, sir,
that at the time of the murder he had still the key with him?
But that’s not all. I don’t know, Mr. Utterson, if you ever met
this Mr. Hyde?”
“Yes,” said the lawyer, “I once spoke with him.”
“Then you must know as well as the rest of us that there
was something queer about that gentleman—something
that gave a man a turn—I don’t know rightly how to say it,
sir, beyond this: that you felt in your marrow kind of cold
and thin.”
“I own I felt something of what you describe,” said
Mr. Utterson.
“Quite so, sir,” returned Poole. “Well, when that masked
thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals and
whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice. O,
I know it’s not evidence, Mr. Utterson; I’m book-learned
enough for that; but a man has his feelings, and I give you
my bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!”
“Aye, aye,” said the lawyer. “My fears incline to the same
point. Evil, I fear, founded—evil was sure to come—of that
connection. Aye truly, I believe you; I believe poor Harry is
killed; and I believe his murderer (for what purpose, God
alone can tell) is still lurking in his victim’s room. Well, let
our name be vengeance. Call Bradshaw.”
The footman came at the summons, very white and
nervous.
“Put yourself together, Bradshaw,” said the lawyer. “This
suspense, I know, is telling upon all of you; but it is now our
intention to make an end of it. Poole, here, and I are going to
force our way into the cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are
broad enough to bear the blame. Meanwhile, lest anything
should really be amiss, or any malefactor seek to escape by
the back, you and the boy must go round the corner with a
pair of good sticks and take your post at the laboratory door.
We give you ten minutes, to get to your stations.”
As Bradshaw left, the lawyer looked at his watch. “And
now, Poole, let us get to ours,” he said; and taking the poker
under his arm, led the way into the yard. The scud had
banked over the moon, and it was now quite dark. The wind,
which only broke in puffs and draughts into that deep well of
building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro about their
steps, until they came into the shelter of the theatre, where
they sat down silently to wait. London hummed solemnly all
around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was only broken by
the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the cabinet
floor.
“So it will walk all day, sir,” whispered Poole; “aye, and the
better part of the night. Only when a new sample comes
from the chemist, there’s a bit of a break. Ah, it’s an ill
conscience that’s such an enemy to rest! Ah, sir, there’s
blood foully shed in every step of it! But hark again, a little
closer—put your heart in your ears, Mr. Utterson, and tell
me, is that the doctor’s foot?”
The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, for
all they went so slowly; it was different indeed from the
heavy creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. Utterson sighed. “Is
there never anything else?” he asked.
Poole nodded. “Once,” he said. “Once I heard it weeping!”
“Weeping? how that?” said the lawyer, conscious of a
sudden chill of horror.
“Weeping like a woman or a lost soul,” said the butler. “I
came away with that upon my heart, that I could have wept
too.”
But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Poole disinterred
the axe from under a stack of packing straw; the candle was
set upon the nearest table to light them to the attack; and
they drew near with bated breath to where that patient foot
was still going up and down, up and down, in the quiet of
the night. “Jekyll,” cried Utterson, with a loud voice, “I
demand to see you.” He paused a moment, but there came
no reply. “I give you fair warning, our suspicions are aroused,
and I must and shall see you,” he resumed; “if not by fair
means, then by foul—if not of your consent, then by brute
force!”
“Utterson,” said the voice, “for God’s sake, have mercy!”
“Ah, that’s not Jekyll’s voice—it’s Hyde’s!” cried Utterson.
“Down with the door, Poole!”
Poole swung the axe over his shoulder; the blow shook the
building, and the red baize door leaped against the lock and
hinges. A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang from
the cabinet. Up went the axe again, and again the panels
crashed and the frame bounded; four times the blow fell;
but the wood was tough and the fittings were of excellent
workmanship; and it was not until the fifth, that the lock
burst and the wreck of the door fell inwards on the carpet.
The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the stillness
that had succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There
lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a
good fire glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle
singing its thin strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly
set forth on the business table, and nearer the fire, the
things laid out for tea; the quietest room, you would have
said, and, but for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the
most commonplace that night in London.
Right in the middle there lay the body of a man sorely
contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe,
turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He
was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the
doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a
semblance of life, but life was quite gone: and by the
crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels
that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking
on the body of a self-destroyer.
“We have come too late,” he said sternly, “whether to save
or punish. Hyde is gone to his account; and it only remains
for us to find the body of your master.”
The far greater proportion of the building was occupied by
the theatre, which filled almost the whole ground storey and
was lighted from above, and by the cabinet, which formed
an upper story at one end and looked upon the court. A
corridor joined the theatre to the door on the bystreet; and
with this the cabinet communicated separately by a second
flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets and a
spacious cellar. All these they now thoroughly examined.
Each closet needed but a glance, for all were empty, and all,
by the dust that fell from their doors, had stood long
unopened. The cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber,
mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll’s
predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were
advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of
a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the
entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of Henry Jekyll dead
or alive.
 Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. “He must be
buried here,” he said, hearkening to the sound.
“Or he may have fled,” said Utterson, and he turned to
examine the door in the bystreet. It was locked; and lying
near by on the flags, they found the key, already stained
with rust.
“This does not look like use,” observed the lawyer.
“Use!” echoed Poole. “Do you not see, sir, it is broken?
much as if a man had stamped on it.”
“Aye,” continued Utterson, “and the fractures, too, are
rusty.” The two men looked at each other with a scare. “This
is beyond me, Poole,” said the lawyer. “Let us go back to the
cabinet.”
They mounted the stair in silence, and still with an
occasional awestruck glance at the dead body, proceeded
more thoroughly to examine the contents of the cabinet. At
one table, there were traces of chemical work, various
measured heaps of some white salt being laid on glass
saucers, as though for an experiment in which the unhappy
man had been prevented.
“That is the same drug that I was always bringing him,”
said Poole; and even as he spoke, the kettle with a startling
noise boiled over.
This brought them to the fireside, where the easy-chair
was drawn cosily up, and the tea things stood ready to the
sitter’s elbow, the very sugar in the cup. There were several
books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea things open, and
Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for
which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem,
annotated, in his own hand with startling blasphemies.
Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the
searchers came to the cheval-glass, into whose depths they
looked with an involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to
show them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof,
the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the glazed
front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful
countenances stooping to look in.
“This glass has seen some strange things, sir,” whispered
Poole.
“And surely none stranger than itself,” echoed the lawyer
in the same tones. “For what did Jekyll”—he caught himself
up at the word with a start, and then conquering the
weakness—“what could Jekyll want with it?” he said.
“You may say that!” said Poole.
Next they turned to the business table. On the desk,
among the neat array of papers, a large envelope was
uppermost, and bore, in the doctor’s hand, the name of
Mr. Utterson. The lawyer unsealed it, and several enclosures
fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in the same
eccentric terms as the one which he had returned six
months before, to serve as a testament in case of death and
as a deed of gift in case of disappearance; but in place of the
name of Edward Hyde, the lawyer, with indescribable
amazement read the name of Gabriel John Utterson. He
looked at Poole, and then back at the paper, and last of all at
the dead malefactor stretched upon the carpet.
“My head goes round,” he said. “He has been all these
days in possession; he had no cause to like me; he must
have raged to see himself displaced; and he has not
destroyed this document.”
He caught up the next paper; it was a brief note in the
doctor’s hand and dated at the top. “O Poole!” the lawyer
cried, “he was alive and here this day. He cannot have been
disposed of in so short a space; he must be still alive, he
must have fled! And then, why fled? and how? and in that
case, can we venture to declare this suicide? O, we must be
careful. I foresee that we may yet involve your master in
some dire catastrophe.”
“Why don’t you read it, sir?” asked Poole.
“Because I fear,” replied the lawyer solemnly. “God grant I
have no cause for it!” And with that he brought the paper to
his eyes and read as follows:

“My dear Utterson—When this shall fall into your

hands, I shall have disappeared, under what
circumstances I have not the penetration to
foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances
of my nameless situation tell me that the end is
sure and must be early. Go then, and first read the
narrative which Lanyon warned me he was to
place in your hands; and if you care to hear more,
turn to the confession of

“Your unworthy and unhappy friend,

“HENRY JEKYLL.”

“There was a third enclosure?” asked Utterson.

“Here, sir,” said Poole, and gave into his hands a
considerable packet sealed in several places.
The lawyer put it in his pocket. “I would say nothing of this
paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least
save his credit. It is now ten; I must go home and read these
documents in quiet; but I shall be back before midnight,
when we shall send for the police.”
They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind
them; and Utterson, once more leaving the servants
gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his office
to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to
be explained.
 DR. LANYON’S NARRATIVE

On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the

evening delivery a registered envelope, addressed in the
hand of my colleague and old school companion, Henry
Jekyll. I was a good deal surprised by this; for we were by no
means in the habit of correspondence; I had seen the man,
dined with him, indeed, the night before; and I could
imagine nothing in our intercourse that should justify
formality of registration. The contents increased my wonder;
for this is how the letter ran:

“10th December, 18—.

“Dear Lanyon—You are one of my oldest friends;
and although we may have differed at times on
scientific questions, I cannot remember, at least
on my side, any break in our affection. There was
never a day when, if you had said to me, ‘Jekyll,
my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you,’
I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help
you. Lanyon my life, my honour, my reason, are all
at your mercy; if you fail me tonight, I am lost. You
might suppose, after this preface, that I am going
to ask you for something dishonourable to grant.
Judge for yourself.
“I want you to postpone all other engagements
for tonight—aye, even if you were summoned to
the bedside of an emperor; to take a cab, unless
your carriage should be actually at the door; and
with this letter in your hand for consultation, to
drive straight to my house. Poole, my butler, has
his orders; you will find him waiting your arrival
with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to
be forced: and you are to go in alone; to open the
glazed press (letter E) on the left hand, breaking
the lock if it be shut; and to draw out, with all its
contents as they stand, the fourth drawer from the
top or (which is the same thing) the third from the
bottom. In my extreme distress of mind, I have a
morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in
error, you may know the right drawer by its
contents: some powders, a phial and a paper book.
This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to
Cavendish Square exactly as it stands.
“That is the first part of the service: now for the
second. You should be back, if you set out at once
on the receipt of this, long before midnight; but I
will leave you that amount of margin, not only in
the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither
be prevented nor foreseen, but because an hour
when your servants are in bed is to be preferred
for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then,
I have to ask you to be alone in your consulting
room, to admit with your own hand into the house
a man who will present himself in my name, and to
place in his hands the drawer that you will have
brought with you from my cabinet. Then you will
have played your part and earned my gratitude
completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist
upon an explanation, you will have understood
that these arrangements are of capital
importance; and that by the neglect of one of
them, fantastic as they must appear, you might
have charged your conscience with my death or
the shipwreck of my reason.
 “Confident as I am that you will not trifle with
this appeal, my heart sinks and my hand trembles
at the bare thought of such a possibility. Think of
me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring
under a blackness of distress that no fancy can
exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but
punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away
like a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon
and save

“Your friend,
“H. J.

“P.S.—I had already sealed this up when a fresh

terror struck upon my soul. It is possible that the
post-office may fail me, and this letter not come
into your hands until tomorrow morning. In that
case, dear Lanyon, do my errand when it shall be
most convenient for you in the course of the day;
and once more expect my messenger at midnight.
It may then already be too late; and if that night
passes without event, you will know that you have
seen the last of Henry Jekyll.”

Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague

was insane; but till that was proved beyond the possibility of
doubt, I felt bound to do as he requested. The less I
understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to
judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could not
be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly
from table, got into a hansom, and drove straight to Jekyll’s
house. The butler was awaiting my arrival; he had received
by the same post as mine a registered letter of instruction,
and had sent at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The
tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we moved
in a body to old Dr. Denman’s surgical theatre, from which
(as you are doubtless aware) Jekyll’s private cabinet is most
conveniently entered. The door was very strong, the lock
excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great
trouble and have to do much damage, if force were to be
used; and the locksmith was near despair. But this last was a
handy fellow, and after two hour’s work, the door stood
open. The press marked E was unlocked; and I took out the
drawer, had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and
returned with it to Cavendish Square.
Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders
were neatly enough made up, but not with the nicety of the
dispensing chemist; so that it was plain they were of Jekyll’s
private manufacture: and when I opened one of the
wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline
salt of a white colour. The phial, to which I next turned my
attention, might have been about half full of a blood-red
liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and
seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile
ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess. The
book was an ordinary version book and contained little but a
series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I
observed that the entries ceased nearly a year ago and
quite abruptly. Here and there a brief remark was appended
to a date, usually no more than a single word: “double”
occurring perhaps six times in a total of several hundred
entries; and once very early in the list and followed by
several marks of exclamation, “total failure!!!” All this,
though it whetted my curiosity, told me little that was
definite. Here were a phial of some salt, and the record of a
series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll’s
investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How could
the presence of these articles in my house affect either the
honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his
messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to
another? And even granting some impediment, why was this
gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more I
reflected the more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a
case of cerebral disease; and though I dismissed my
servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I might be
found in some posture of self-defence.
Twelve o’clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the
knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at
the summons, and found a small man crouching against the
pillars of the portico.
“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.
He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I had
bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching
backward glance into the darkness of the square. There was
a policeman not far off, advancing with his bull’s eye open;
and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made
greater haste.
These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and
as I followed him into the bright light of the consulting room,
I kept my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a
chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him
before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I
was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face,
with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity
and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but
not least—with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by
his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient
rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the
pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic,
personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of
the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the
cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn
on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his
entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a
disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would
have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is
to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were
enormously too large for him in every measurement—the
trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them
from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches,
and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to
relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me
to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and
misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now
faced me—something seizing, surprising and revolting—this
fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it;
so that to my interest in the man’s nature and character,
there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his
fortune and status in the world.
These observations, though they have taken so great a
space to be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds.
My visitor was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.
“Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you got it?” And so
lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon
my arm and sought to shake me.
I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang
along my blood. “Come, sir,” said I. “You forget that I have
not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you
please.” And I showed him an example, and sat down myself
in my customary seat and with as fair an imitation of my
ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour,
the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my
visitor, would suffer me to muster.
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly enough.
“What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has
shown its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance
of your colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of
some moment; and I understood …” He paused and put his
hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected
manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the
hysteria—“I understood, a drawer …”
But here I took pity on my visitor’s suspense, and some
perhaps on my own growing curiosity.
 “There it is, sir,” said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay
on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.
He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon
his heart: I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive
action of his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I
grew alarmed both for his life and reason.
“Compose yourself,” said I.
He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the
decision of despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the
contents, he uttered one loud sob of such immense relief
that I sat petrified. And the next moment, in a voice that was
already fairly well under control, “Have you a graduated
glass?” he asked.
I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave
him what he asked.
He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few
minims of the red tincture and added one of the powders.
The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in
proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to
effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour.
Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased
and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded
again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had
watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set
down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked
upon me with an air of scrutiny.
“And now,” said he, “to settle what remains. Will you be
wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this
glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without
further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much
command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be
done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you
were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of
service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted
as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to
choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to
fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room,
upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a
prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan.”
“Sir,” said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly
possessing, “you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not
wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of
belief. But I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable
services to pause before I see the end.”
“It is well,” replied my visitor. “Lanyon, you remember your
vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And
now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow
and material views, you who have denied the virtue of
transcendental medicine, you who have derided your
superiors—behold!”
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry
followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and
held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open
mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he
seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the
features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, I
had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my
arms raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind
submerged in terror.
“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for
there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting,
and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored
from death—there stood Henry Jekyll!
What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind
to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and
my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has
faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot
answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the
deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night;
and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die;
and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude
that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I can
not, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I
will say but one thing, Utterson, and that (if you can bring
your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The
creature who crept into my house that night was, on Jekyll’s
own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for
in every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.

HASTIE LANYON
 HENRY JEKYLL’S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE

I was born in the year 18— to a large fortune, endowed

besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry,
fond of the respect of the wise and good among my
fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with
every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future.
And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient
gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of
many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my
imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more
than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence
it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when
I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me
and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I
stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me.
Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as
I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before
me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of
shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my
aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults,
that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench
than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces
of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual
nature. In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and
inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of
religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress.
Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a
hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no
more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in
shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the
furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and
suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific
studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the
transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this
consciousness of the perennial war among my members.
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the
moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that
truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to
such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but
truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge
does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others
will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess
that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of
multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for
my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in
one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral
side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the
thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two
natures that contended in the field of my consciousness,
even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only
because I was radically both; and from an early date, even
before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to
suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had
learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on
the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I
told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life
would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust
might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and
remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk
steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good
things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer
exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this
extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these
incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the
agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should
be continuously struggling. How, then were they
dissociated?
I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side
light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory
table. I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet
been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mistlike
transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk
attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake
and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might
toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will
not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession.
First, because I have been made to learn that the doom and
burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders, and
when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon
us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second,
because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my
discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only
recognised my natural body from the mere aura and
effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit,
but managed to compound a drug by which these powers
should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second
form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to
me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of
lower elements in my soul.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of
practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so
potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity,
might, by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least
inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out
that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change.
But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound
at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since
prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of
wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt
which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient
required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the
elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the
glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong
glow of courage, drank off the potion.
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the
bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot
be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these
agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if
out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my
sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very
novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in
body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a
current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace
in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an
unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew
myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked,
tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the
thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like
wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of
these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I
had lost in stature.
There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which
stands beside me as I write, was brought there later on and
for the very purpose of these transformations. The night
however, was far gone into the morning—the morning, black
as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception of the day—the
inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours
of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with hope and
triumph, to venture in my new shape as far as to my
bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations
looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder,
the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance
had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a
stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for
the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
 I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I
know, but that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil
side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the
stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than
the good which I had just deposed. Again, in the course of
my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of effort,
virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and
much less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about
that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and
younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the
countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly
on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still
believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an
imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon
that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance,
rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed
natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the
spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect
and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to
call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have
observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde,
none could come near to me at first without a visible
misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all
human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of
good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of
mankind, was pure evil.
I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and
conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet
remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond
redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that
was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once
more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the
pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more with the
character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.
That night I had come to the fatal crossroads. Had I
approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked
the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious
aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these
agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel
instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it
was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of
the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of
Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that time my
virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert
and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was
projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two
characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil,
and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous
compound of whose reformation and improvement I had
already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly
toward the worse.
Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the
dryness of a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at
times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least)
undignified, and I was not only well known and highly
considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this
incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It
was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell
in slavery. I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the
body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick
cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion; it seemed
to me at the time to be humourous; and I made my
preparations with the most studious care. I took and
furnished that house in Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by
the police; and engaged as a housekeeper a creature whom I
knew well to be silent and unscrupulous. On the other side, I
announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I
described) was to have full liberty and power about my
house in the square; and to parry mishaps, I even called and
made myself a familiar object, in my second character. I next
drew up that will to which you so much objected; so that if
anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter
on that of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus
fortified, as I supposed, on every side, I began to profit by
the strange immunities of my position.
Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes,
while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I
was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first
that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial
respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off
these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty.
But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was
complete. Think of it—I did not even exist! Let me but
escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two
to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing
ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass
away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his
stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his
study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would
be Henry Jekyll.
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise
were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder
term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to
turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from
these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder
at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of
my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure,
was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act
and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial
avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like
a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the
acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from
ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of
conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was
guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good
qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste,
where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And
thus his conscience slumbered.
 Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for
even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no
design of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings and
the successive steps with which my chastisement
approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought on
no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of
cruelty to a child aroused against me the anger of a
passerby, whom I recognised the other day in the person of
your kinsman; the doctor and the child’s family joined him;
there were moments when I feared for my life; and at last, in
order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had
to bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn
in the name of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily
eliminated from the future, by opening an account at
another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and
when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my
double with a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of
fate.
Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had
been out for one of my adventures, had returned at a late
hour, and woke the next day in bed with somewhat odd
sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in vain I saw
the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the
square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed
curtains and the design of the mahogany frame; something
still kept insisting that I was not where I was, that I had not
wakened where I seemed to be, but in the little room in Soho
where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward
Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my psychological way,
began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion,
occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a
comfortable morning doze. I was still so engaged when, in
one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my
hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often
remarked) was professional in shape and size: it was large,
firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw,
clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning,
lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corder, knuckly,
of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of
hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.
I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I
was in the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in
my breast as sudden and startling as the crash of cymbals;
and bounding from my bed I rushed to the mirror. At the
sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into
something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed
Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to
be explained? I asked myself; and then, with another bound
of terror—how was it to be remedied? It was well on in the
morning; the servants were up; all my drugs were in the
cabinet—a long journey down two pairs of stairs, through
the back passage, across the open court and through the
anatomical theatre, from where I was then standing horror-
struck. It might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of
what use was that, when I was unable to conceal the
alteration in my stature? And then with an overpowering
sweetness of relief, it came back upon my mind that the
servants were already used to the coming and going of my
second self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was able, in
clothes of my own size: had soon passed through the house,
where Bradshaw stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at
such an hour and in such a strange array; and ten minutes
later, Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape and was
sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of
breakfasting.
Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident,
this reversal of my previous experience, seemed, like the
Babylonian finger on the wall, to be spelling out the letters
of my judgment; and I began to reflect more seriously than
ever before on the issues and possibilities of my double
existence. That part of me which I had the power of
projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished; it
had seemed to me of late as though the body of Edward
Hyde had grown in stature, as though (when I wore that
form) I were conscious of a more generous tide of blood; and
I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged,
the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown,
the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the
character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine. The
power of the drug had not been always equally displayed.
Once, very early in my career, it had totally failed me; since
then I had been obliged on more than one occasion to
double, and once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the
amount; and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the
sole shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the
light of that morning’s accident, I was led to remark that
whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw
off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly
transferred itself to the other side. All things therefore
seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my
original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated
with my second and worse.
Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two
natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were
most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was
composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now
with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures
and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll,
or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers
the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll
had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a
son’s indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to
those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had
of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die
to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a
blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain
might appear unequal; but there was still another
consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer
smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not
even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my
circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and
commonplace as man; much the same inducements and
alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner;
and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of
my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found
wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor,
surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and
bade a resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative
youth, the light step, leaping impulses and secret pleasures,
that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made this
choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I
neither gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the
clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay ready in my cabinet.
For two months, however, I was true to my determination;
for two months, I led a life of such severity as I had never
before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an
approving conscience. But time began at last to obliterate
the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began
to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with
throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom;
and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again
compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with
himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times
affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish,
physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered
my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral
insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the
leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I
was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out
roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a
more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must have
been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of
impatience with which I listened to the civilities of my
unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God, no man
morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so
pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable
spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything.
But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing
instincts by which even the worst of us continues to walk
with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and in
my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a
transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting
delight from every blow; and it was not till weariness had
begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my
delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. A
mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the
scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my
lust of evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed
to the topmost peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make
assurance doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set
out through the lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy
of mind, gloating on my crime, lightheadedly devising
others in the future, and yet still hastening and still
hearkening in my wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde
had a song upon his lips as he compounded the draught,
and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of
transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry
Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had
fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God.
The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw
my life as a whole: I followed it up from the days of
childhood, when I had walked with my father’s hand, and
through the self-denying toils of my professional life, to
arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality, at
the damned horrors of the evening. I could have screamed
aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the
crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory
swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the
ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the
acuteness of this remorse began to die away, it was
succeeded by a sense of joy. The problem of my conduct was
solved. Hyde was thenceforth impossible; whether I would or
not, I was now confined to the better part of my existence;
and O, how I rejoiced to think of it! with what willing
humility I embraced anew the restrictions of natural life!
with what sincere renunciation I locked the door by which I
had so often gone and come, and ground the key under my
heel!
The next day, came the news that the murder had not
been overlooked, that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the
world, and that the victim was a man high in public
estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a tragic folly.
I think I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have my
better impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors
of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but
Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all men would
be raised to take and slay him.
I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I
can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some
good. You know yourself how earnestly, in the last months of
the last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that
much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly,
almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied
of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I
daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with
my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence
wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently
chained down, began to growl for licence. Not that I
dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that would
startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was
once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was
as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the
assaults of temptation.
 There comes an end to all things; the most capacious
measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to my
evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was
not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the old
days before I had made my discovery. It was a fine, clear,
January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but
cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s Park was full of winter
chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on
a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory;
the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent
penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I
was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing
myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with
the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of
that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid
nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed
away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness
subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of
my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a
solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my
clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand
that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more
Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of all men’s
respect, wealthy, beloved—the cloth laying for me in the
dining room at home; and now I was the common quarry of
mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the
gallows.
My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have
more than once observed that in my second character, my
faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more
tensely elastic; thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps
might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the
moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet;
how was I to reach them? That was the problem that
(crushing my temples in my hands) I set myself to solve. The
laboratory door I had closed. If I sought to enter by the
house, my own servants would consign me to the gallows. I
saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon.
How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that
I escaped capture in the streets, how was I to make my way
into his presence? and how should I, an unknown and
displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician to rifle
the study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered
that of my original character, one part remained to me: I
could write my own hand; and once I had conceived that
kindling spark, the way that I must follow became lighted up
from end to end.
Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and
summoning a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland
Street, the name of which I chanced to remember. At my
appearance (which was indeed comical enough, however
tragic a fate these garments covered) the driver could not
conceal his mirth. I gnashed my teeth upon him with a gust
of devilish fury; and the smile withered from his face—
happily for him—yet more happily for myself, for in another
instant I had certainly dragged him from his perch. At the
inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so black a
countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look did
they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my
orders, led me to a private room, and brought me
wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of his life was a
creature new to me; shaken with inordinate anger, strung to
the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the creature
was astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the will;
composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and one
to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence of their
being posted, sent them out with directions that they should
be registered. Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in
the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting
alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before his
eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth
in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro
about the streets of the city. He, I say—I cannot say, I. That
child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but
fear and hatred. And when at last, thinking the driver had
begun to grow suspicious, he discharged the cab and
ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object
marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal
passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a
tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to
himself, skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares,
counting the minutes that still divided him from midnight.
Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights.
He smote her in the face, and she fled.
When I came to myself at Lanyon’s, the horror of my old
friend perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was
at least but a drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I
looked back upon these hours. A change had come over me.
It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of
being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon’s
condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream
that I came home to my own house and got into bed. I slept
after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and
profound slumber which not even the nightmares that
wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning
shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the
thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had not of
course forgotten the appalling dangers of the day before;
but I was once more at home, in my own house and close to
my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in
my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.
I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast,
drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized
again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the
change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my
cabinet, before I was once again raging and freezing with
the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose
to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat
looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug
had to be re-administered. In short, from that day forth it
seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only
under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able
to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and
night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above
all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was
always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this
continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to
which I now condemned myself, aye, even beyond what I
had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a
creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak
both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought:
the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or when the
virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without
transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less
marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with
images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a
body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging
energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown
with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now
divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a
thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of
that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena
of consciousness, and was coheir with him to death: and
beyond these links of community, which in themselves
made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of
Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only
hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the
slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the
amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was
dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And
this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer
than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where
he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at
every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber,
prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The
hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of
the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary
suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part
instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed
the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he
resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded.
Hence the apelike tricks that he would play me, scrawling in
my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books,
burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father;
and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would
long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the
ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who
sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall
the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I
know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find
it in my heart to pity him.
It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this
description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that
suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought—no, not
alleviation—but a certain callousness of soul, a certain
acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have
gone on for years, but for the last calamity which has now
fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face
and nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been
renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run
low. I sent out for a fresh supply and mixed the draught; the
ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the
second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn
from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain;
and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure,
and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to
the draught.
About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this
statement under the influence of the last of the old powders.
This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry
Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now
how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to
bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto
escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great
prudence and great good luck. Should the throes of change
take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces;
but if some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his
wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment
will probably save it once again from the action of his
apelike spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us
both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour
from now, when I shall again and forever reindue that hated
personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping
in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and
fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this
room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of
menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find
courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I
am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to
follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay
down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring
the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.
 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
was published in 1886 by
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

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